Yep, your android OS can do something that a bare Linux OS cannot do. I know at the end of the day, Android is just a fancy GUI and assorted ins and outs on top of linux, but it really does make a difference. Just because something runs on one doesn't mean instant compatibility for the other.

I was just thinking about this, although the other services sound good, I think I could have a good simple solution (which will hopefully work for my situation where the RPi does not have internet access (due to company proxy) but does have network, so I can use through VNC).

1. Set up a SMB shared drive on rpi, so it can be viewed from windows PC.2. Setup up file sync software (i.e. AllwaySync) to mirror these files to a sub-directory in windows which is within dropbox...

Bingo...end up with dropbox backup of files and easy way to drop files on the RPi. If I set up another SD-card with the same share, it'll keep both cards synced too.

Just need to work out how to share a directory on the RPi now...As, bredman has pointed out before...http://elinux.org/R-Pi_NASI feel may be my friend here.

Yup. But using the SDK effectively gives you a FTP-like interface, which isn't what people expect when they ask for a Dropbox client - they want the standard 2-way automatic file synchronization (with speedy delta-transfers) that Dropbox on the desktop (or headless x86 Linux) offers

There is another possibility, if you want to access your Dropbox (and, indeed, other "cloud" storage) from your Pi without actually mirroring the files to your local storage: I just found out about a Web service called Otixo, which aims to provide a single "file manager" front-end for accessing your "cloud storage" (Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, Box.net, etc.).

What particularly interests me with Otixo, is that it also provides access to your files on these services as a WebDAV share. I don't know about Debian, but in the Arch "extra" repository, there's a filesystem driver called davfs (named "davfs2" for installation), which allows you to mount a WebDAV share directly into the Pi's filesystem.

In other words: as long as you have an Otixo account (with your desired "cloud storage" services added) and a working Internet connection on the Pi, with one "mount" command you could have access to your Dropbox, etc. without needing the files mirrored locally.

I haven't had time to try it yet, but I think I have a blog post in the offing if it works

AndrewS wrote:Yup. But using the SDK effectively gives you a FTP-like interface, which isn't what people expect when they ask for a Dropbox client - they want the standard 2-way automatic file synchronization (with speedy delta-transfers) that Dropbox on the desktop (or headless x86 Linux) offers

Unless you use the sdk to build exactly that. Easy enough to do in Node.js

tawalker wrote:What particularly interests me with Otixo, is that it also provides access to your files on these services as a WebDAV share. I don't know about Debian, but in the Arch "extra" repository, there's a filesystem driver called davfs (named "davfs2" for installation), which allows you to mount a WebDAV share directly into the Pi's filesystem.

Which is exactly what the DropDAV I linked to earlier does. But Otixo looks cheaper than DropDAV - I wonder exactly how long Otixo will be able to stay "free" for?

AndrewS wrote:Yup. But using the SDK effectively gives you a FTP-like interface, which isn't what people expect when they ask for a Dropbox client - they want the standard 2-way automatic file synchronization (with speedy delta-transfers) that Dropbox on the desktop (or headless x86 Linux) offers

Unless you use the sdk to build exactly that. Easy enough to do in Node.js

The Dropbox SDK only uploads/downloads entire files, not file-deltas. And I'd love to hear how a server-side Node.js script is supposed to automatically spot when a file on your Raspi has changed?

Quite easily with any of the node wrappers around FAM or inotify. I am not sure if you're making a distinction between the pi and 'server-side' but the app would run on the rpi. It's very unlikely any of my rpi will be running anything but headless.

Ah, that's why I was getting confused. Never used Node.js myself so thought it could only run on webservers, didn't realise you could run it "locally" too

Also the Dropbox API does deltas

Yes, but that's change-deltas, not file-deltas. If you only change 1KB in a 50MB file, the traditional Dropbox desktop clients only need to transfer the small part of the file that actually changed, but using the Dropbox API you have to transfer the whole 50MB all over again.

Gotcha. Wouldn't really affect my use case, upload new sensor log payload to a specific directory on Dropbox then delete on the rpi but it would make for a slightly ineffective sync client. Could be fine for many use cases though.

It's important to note that Dropbox claims to create hashes on every 4MB of each file. Which means that if your file are on average less than 4MB, it wouldn't make a difference that you can't use change deltas.